Sunday, January 20, 2013

What’s left but a re-imagining?

I recently contributed to Essay Daily with a piece on Luc Sante's "My Lost City," one of my favorite essays about New York City. Alfred Kazin's perambulatory shadow was lurking about:

While I was re-reading and considering “My Lost City,” I happened upon Alfred Kazin’s gorgeous memoir A Walker In The City,
first published in 1951. Kazin’s ecstatic reminiscences of growing up
in Brownsville, Brooklyn, though a half century older than Sante’s,
share with Sante’s a bittersweet tone and the rapture of novelistic,
sensual detail. Kazin, too, catalogs a litany of urban memories only to
see them ultimately slip through his fingers, lost to time, renewal, and
personal widening perspective. Walking toward Highland Park one day in
the early 1930s, Kazin experienced a leap of clarity:

I had made a discovery; I had stumbled on a connection between myself
and the shape and color of time in the streets of New York. Though I
knew that brownstones were old-fashioned and had read scornful
references to them in novels, it was just the thick, solid way in which
they gripped to themselves some texture of the city’s past that now
fascinated me…. I had made a discovery: walking could take me back into
the America of the nineteenth century.

But for the glow of the lyricism, this passage might’ve been written by
Sante (who’s generally more circumspect with his gushing). Every
generation, it seems, mourns the beauty of its surroundings, no matter
how shabby or troubled, certain already of its vanishing to the next
generation, which will continue the process of loss and discovery.
Meanwhile, while recognizing with a twinge of pain our own, minor
losses, we come closer to understanding the grand sweep of history and
our small but essential place in it.

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Author of Sweat: The Story of The Fleshtones, America’s Garage Band, Installations (National Poetry Series), Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found, AC/DC’s Highway to Hell (33 1/3 Series), Conversations With Greil Marcus, This Must Be Where My Obsession With Infinity Began (essays), Field Recordings from the Inside (essays), and No Place I Would Rather Be: Roger Angell and a Life in Baseball Writing✸✸ Music Columnist for The Normal School. ✸✸ Five-time "Notable Essay" selection at Best American Essays. ✸✸ Professor of English at Northern Illinois University.

MY BOOKS

"Of the recent books I have read about baseball, Joe Bonomo's...is one of the best, not only for Bonomo's considerable writing skills, but also for his compelling portrayal of Angell's erudition and unique focus on the 'lesser and sweeter moments' of the sport he loves." America Magazine

“The collection’s 18 essays do what the best music writing is supposed to do—they make the reader care, regardless of whether they enjoy, or are familiar with, the material being written about; I was mostly willing to follow Bonomo anywhere he wanted to go.” Los Angeles Review of Books

"Joe Bonomo seems to have a Cornell box for each difficult, lyrical moment he remembers. He is a theorist of the self's construction out of the past, full of resistance and the heartbreaking urge to yield." David Lazar

"Marcus's knowledge of music and his widespread interests in related topics make this a delight and a real page-turner." The Big Takeover

"One of the five most important books about AC/DC." Jesse Fink, author of Bon: The Last Highway

"I've read most of the books about him and will now put Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found on the indispensable list. It's one of the best books about the man and his music." Lincoln Journal Star

"Joe Bonomo has written a fine book: a book not only about a band or times passed, but also about the rare virtue of endurance." Nick Tosches